Arabs shouldn't look to US

The image was indelible, the message historic: Not quite six months ago, Barack Obama, at once eloquent and charismatic, addresses the people of the Arab world from a podium at a university campus in Cairo. He assures them that America as a big power will be a fair-minded, even-handed arbiter of world order. His new administration's foreign policy will be imbued with a moral adjunct, where "rules must be binding, and words must mean something".

This new administration, in other words, will not be selective in its values, embracing the view, as its predecessor had done, that history is an instrument of a powerful nation, free to act unilaterally and with impunity. He spoke of the unendurable "humiliations" of the Palestinian people and promised that his government would broker a peace settlement "with all the patience and dedication that the task requires" in order to end those humiliations. The response to his overture by Arabs was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. He asked them to hope, and they hoped. After all, was he not the orator who knew all about how "the audacity of hope" is generated and acquired?

So we all hoped. Like the fools we were, we all hoped. And Palestinians, living a life of despair in the West Bank and Gaza, where Israeli occupiers, after four long decades of occupation, had made an abstraction of their humanity, also hoped — for no lesser fools were they.

"It's not the despair, Laura," a character in Michael Frayn's 1986 film, Clockwise, intones. "I can stand the despair. It's the hope."

The months have dragged and instead of a president who backs his pledges with concerted action, to whom "words must mean something", we have, yes, a dithering, indecisive, even weak leader, who eats humble pie, and takes it on the chin, when Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's obdurate and expansionist prime minister, thumbs his nose at him, a president who has Hillary Clinton, his top diplomat, claim that Israel had actually made "unprecedented concessions" in its colonial enterprise in the Occupied Territories, including Occupied Jerusalem.

Deflated hopes

Deflated hopes are indeed, as Michael Frayn's character had it, more grievous than despair. Despair we tolerate as part of the cross-weave of our existence, but deflated hopes bring disorienting vertigo with them.

I for one do not, however, blame Washington for prevaricating. I blame us in the Arab world for having become a weak and dependent people relying not on our resources to solve our own problems, in our own part of the world, but on Washington's big power whimsies.

All of which inevitably raises the question here as to why Arabs, not least of all Palestinian Arabs, have failed all these years to meet the challenges of modernity, and why, in their modern history, to quote that immortal line by Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, they have "always depended on the kindness of strangers" to solve their problems in Palestine. How does an Arab respond to his children's question about why the Arab countries appear to stand there, as if with hat in hand, expecting rulers in some foreign capital to find the solution to a conflict raging in the heartland of their world? We know the supreme relevance of the question, we know it lies at the central knot of our political culture today, but we hardly grasp its immense implications.

The reality is that our weakness, with dependence as its predictable consequence, stems from the fact that our polities have unfailingly refused to see the necessary kinship between freedom and what classical Arabs had called assabiyeh, or social elan — freedom of the individual citizen to choose his way, to do his own thing, and to speak his own mind, without fear of retribution. That kind of freedom lies at the core of a dynamic society. Stalinism has shown that a political system can outlaw that freedom. But once it is outlawed, rot, or the disintegrative process, sets in.

The United States, all the way from the Rogers Peace Plan, almost four decades ago, to the Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn 16 years ago, along with a heap (the term is appropriate) of other seemingly well-intentioned peace plans, has given us promises that all amounted to naught. Year after year, worn, threadbare peace plans became carcasses, with everyone chewing on the current jargon — ‘Jordanian option', ‘autonomy', ‘road map', ‘two-state solution' — and the rest of it. Forty years and still counting.

Yet with each betrayal our sense of shock is renewed. We never learn. But, Hey, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

It is as if the metaphors of that assabiyeh from our classical past are now inert and the energies that animated our identity then are now bone-dry.

The question is this: What are we, and we alone, going to do about it? You want to go on hoping, because you have the audacity to do so, it's fine with the world. But in the end it is the answer to that question that we must come to terms with, for the solution to the Palestine problem is unalterably Arab. America is, or should be in this regard, irrelevant.

 Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.